About Microfinance

About Microfinance

Microfinance is a general term to describe financial services to low-income individuals or to those who do not have access to typical banking services.

Microfinance is also the idea that low-income individuals are capable of lifting themselves out of poverty if given access to financial services. While some studies indicate that microfinance can play a role in the battle against poverty, it is also recognized that is not always the appropriate method, and that it should never be seen as the only tool for ending poverty.

What is Microfinance?

Microfinance is the supply of loans, savings, and other basic financial services to the poor.

As these financial services usually involve small amounts of money - small loans, small savings, etc. - the term "microfinance" helps to differentiate these services from those which formal banks provide.

Why are they small? Someone who doesn't have a lot of money isn't likely to want or be able to take out a 50,000 loan, or be able to open a savings account with an opening balance of 1,000.

It's easy to imagine poor people don't need financial services, but when you think about it they are using these services already, although they might look a little different.

Poor people save all the time, although mostly in informal ways. They invest in assets such as gold, jewelry, domestic animals, building materials, and things that can be easily exchanged for cash. They may set aside corn from their harvest to sell at a later date. They bury cash in the garden or stash it under the mattress. They participate in informal savings groups where everyone contributes a small amount of cash each day, week, or month, and is successively awarded the pot on a rotating basis. Some of these groups allow members to borrow from the pot as well. The poor also give their money to neighbors to hold or pay local cash collectors to keep it safe.

However widely used, informal savings mechanisms have serious limitations. It is not possible, for example, to cut a leg off a goat when the family suddenly needs a small amount of cash. In-kind savings are subject to fluctuations in commodity prices, destruction by insects, fire, thieves, or illness (in the case of livestock). Informal rotating savings groups tend to be small and rotate limited amounts of money. Moreover, these groups often require rigid amounts of money at set intervals and do not react to changes in their members' ability to save. Perhaps most importantly, the poor are more likely to lose their money through fraud or mismanagement in informal savings arrangements than are depositors in formal financial institutions.